Artificial Intelligence has transformed the face of industries worldwide. Further, with the rapid growth of Generative AI, it seems only to be gaining added momentum. I recently heard two insightful discussions on the topic, each representing a distinct perspective.
The first one offered a global perspective, an interview of Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of Accenture, at an SF Conference on AI. He spoke about global trends on implementation and impact of AI in businesses. The second one offered an India-level perspective, an interview of the indomitable Nandan Nilekani, at the World Economic Summit, explaining how AI is getting implemented at 1.4bn pop scale. Both great videos. But I am aware how busy we are 😊…hence, sharing my notes with the bullet-point highlights here…
Paul Daugherty at an SF Conference on AI
Accenture 2024 Gen AI outlook: Chief Tech and Innovation Officer Paul Daugherty
1. Gen AI is transformative – 97% of the executive respondents are of the view that Gen AI would make their businesses change.
2. Impact on work – Gen AI is deemed to be an enhancer for 44% of all working hours across industries, and an impact of between $8 and $10 trillion is estimated in the coming years.
3. Boost in productivity and creativity – Productivity gets enhanced and so do outcomes and creative output.
4. From infrastructure to human capability – While the earlier technology revolutions were primarily infrastructural in nature, this one has to do with the human capabilities.
5. Case in point – In a telecom project, Gen AI enhanced customer service productivity by 30 percent and customer satisfaction by 65 percent.
6. Creativity in action – Digital agencies like Accenture Song reported increased creativity after deploying the Gen AI tools.
7. AI in B2B sales – Accenture’s sales team reaped the benefits of AI-fueled efficiencies, stripping away less relevant activities and driving overall performance.
8. AI is changing jobs – Rather than replacing jobs, AI is more likely to redefine jobs
9. The Inflection Point in 2024 – It is going to be the year experimentation gives way to tangible value from Gen AI
In a nutshell, Gen AI is revolutionizing industries by boosting productivity, creativity, and enhancing human capabilities rather than just replacing jobs. As we enter 2024, the focus shifts from experimentation to generating real business value across sectors.
Now, let’s look at the Indian perspective:
Nandan Nilekani at the World Economic Summit
Indian Perspective: Nandan Nilekani on AI at Scale
Nandan Nilekani explains beautifully how India is employing AI for such a huge population:
• AI on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) – With UPI used by 500 million users and doing 13 billion transactions every month, AI will enable users to interact with the system much more intuitively. For instance, AI can allow a user to transfer money just by speaking to the app. Such augmentative use cases of AI will help DPI and UPI explode further.
• AI at population scale – Built to scale of 1.4bn people, Indian applications can become unbeatable in learning
• Societal AI – India is focusing on the application of AI for real problems of people. This covers areas like education, health care, agriculture, and language through the design of cost-efficient solutions.
• An open-source multi-language stack – India is building an open-source stack that they can use which houses thousands of hours of Hindi, Tamil, and other languages incorporated into the AI models. An excellent tool for Startups.
• Incorporation of AI in Education – Assisted Language Learning application is being rolled out in 6000 schools funded by Nilekani Foundation. Teaching basic literacy and numeracy.
• Curated Training for India’s AI – If we scrap the Internet, we will get the bias of the Internet. Hence, we must be careful in what we train our models on. With the Bounded models being trained on a specific set of data, incorrect interpretations can be minimised and the application can be used for serious societal applications like assisting teachers to teach better, assisting healthcare workers to administer better health care, etc.
The Indian software development industry is now the largest in the world – USD 250 billion. Also, DPI and an ecosystem of over 100,000 startups lay a strong foundation to establish India as one of the leaders in AI. In five years, we will be able to identify distinct impact made by AI on public health, education, agriculture and finally on GDP growth.
My Take: The Future of Gen AI
• Gen AI Revolution – As I reflect on these insights, it clearly shows the gen AI is indeed the fourth big technological leap, after electricity, computing, and the Internet. Of course, there could be a tiny degree of recency bias in this evaluation, but we will have to wait and watch how this unfolds.
• Solving real-life problems (Societal AI) – The first take-away from Nandan Nilekani’s interview is that there is a differentiation in the application of AI between developing and developed countries. His concept of Societal AI specifically tailored for the needs of South Asia and Africa underlines the importance of AI in solving real-world problems.
• AI Workforce Training – All employees in all medium and large businesses need to be trained in the basics of Gen AI; all companies need to develop their own wrapper-app based on existing LLMs. By 2030, we should have 50% penetration of Gen AI in ALL processes of ALL businesses of ALL companies in the world.
This is but the beginning of what promises to be an extraordinary journey. Let’s keep our eyes open and see change.
